Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940
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Making Whitenessis a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled—and distorting—component of twentieth-century American identity. In intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation. And in a bold and transformative analysis of the meaning of segregation for the nation as a whole, she explains how white southerners' creation of modern "whiteness" was, beginning in the 1920s, taken up by the rest of the nation as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy while at the same time creating the illusion of a national, egalitarian, consumerist democracy.
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By showing the very recent historical "making" of contemporary American whiteness and by examining how the culture of segregation, in all its murderous contradictions, was lived, Hale makes it possible to imagine a future outside it. Her vision holds out the difficult promise of a truly democratic American identity whose possibilities are no longer limited and disfigured by race.
Liked Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
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Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 Shares history, race, nonfiction -
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race Shares race, history, nonfiction -
The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control (Volume 1) (Haymarket Series) Shares race, history, nonfiction -
Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America Shares race, history, nonfiction
“People who read Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 tend to reach for these next.”
“If you want more of the same (history about race), start with these.”
- The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Volume 2) (Haymarket Series)
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Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937 1957
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Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South
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A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America
